IT Terms Every Business Owner Should Know

Jargon. Any business owner knows that the overuse of it, when communicating with customers, can be the kiss of death. At one level, your use of industry terms and industry lingo can help you look like an expert; taken too far and you’ve become an insufferable wind-bag. As technophiles, we run into this problem all the time. Where we truly want to communicate in layman’s terms, to many business owners, a well-intended IT consultant can come off as overbearing when using idioms that we believe to be common knowledge. In an effort to effectively communicate, we’ve compiled a list of IT support terms that we use on a daily basis. These common terms and acronyms include:

ISP – Written or spoken in its full use, rather than just the acronym, Internet Service Provider is actually pretty self-explanatory. Your ISP is the company that you pay for your internet connection and service.

LAN – Another simple acronym, a LAN is a Local Area Network. Either an office network or a home network is considered a LAN.

WAN- A Wide Area Network serves a much wider area than your LAN. For instance, your ISP uses their WAN to connect your network to the internet.

IP Address – Every computer on a network is assigned a numerical address. That address is referred to as an Internet Protocol, or IP, address.

Router – Basically, a router does just that. It routes information between your local devices and the internet.

Though these terms are fairly basic, they do represent just the beginning of technology lingo and jargon that encompasses the IT and computer networking world. We’ll discuss more terms in our next post so check back to learn more.